​The prints in this series emerged from my essays on fairly marginal characters in the Bible. The material I discovered -- mainly from the sages -- was so rich that it inspired me to think in terms of a graphic interpretation of them. Naturally, what I had written influenced the way I portrayed these people, and I offer both of them to you. ​-- Mordechai Beck​

Parshat Shmot:Pharaoh’s DaughterExodus 2: 5-10​​The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe in the river; and her maidens walked along by the river-side; she saw the ark among the reeds and sent her handmaid to fetch it. She opened it, and saw the child – a boy that wept. She had compassion on him, and said: "This is one of the Hebrews' children."

Then said his sister to Pharaoh's daughter: “Shall I go and call you a nurse from the Hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for you?” And Pharaoh's daughter said to her: “Go.” And the maiden went and called the child's mother.

Pharaoh's daughter said to her: “Take this child away, and nurse it for me, and I will give you your wages.” The woman took the child, and nursed it. The child grew, and she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son. And she called his name Moses, and said: “Because I drew him out of the water.”​

Pharaoh’s Daughter: A Study in Heroism

In my papercut, I show Pharaoh's daughter in the background, having handed over the baby Moses to his sister Miriam. I wanted to make the scene intimate, hence the flora that surrounds the two young women, as though they are both hiding from the limelight, not out of fear so much as because both are humble.

This was my first Bat Pharaoh, which I was commissioned to create for the TALI school system in Israel. I decided on this technique because of the audience -- young children -- go for papercuts which have simpler, strong colors.

Rabbinic PerspectivesThough lacking a personal name in the one Biblical passage in which she appears (Exodus 2: 5-10), the sages identify the daughter of the Pharaoh of the Exodus with Bitya (I Chronicles 4:18) -- no longer the anonymous daughter of an anonymous Pharaoh, but rather the daughter of God -- Bit–Ya.

This extraordinary change of fate is occasioned by her heroic deed of saving the Hebrew baby whom she has espied floating in a reed basket on the River Nile. She knows it is a Hebrew child, say the sages, because he is circumcised.​Others speculate that she realized he was special because he radiated with the Divine Presence. Still other midrashim cite the fact that her various ailments (different sources are divided over which ones) were cured when she touched him; others say this happened when she merely touched the basket.

The degree of heroism shown by this woman may be gauged by the fact that all Hebrew males were subject of a decree of death by her father (Exodus 1:16). Her action was therefore not merely to protest this edict, but rather against the entire structure of authority that existed in Egypt. Indeed, the main Talmudic source of these legends observes that she was even opposed by her maids-in-waiting, who were subsequently killed by the angel Gabriel for their effrontery (Sota 12).

Bitya’s immediate reward was to name the baby she had just rescued from the water – Moses – which the text derives from the verb to draw out of the water (mishitehoo) (ibid 10). Though Yocheved gave birth to him, says the Talmud, Bitya merited his retaining the name she gave him since she brought him up (Sanhedrin 19; Shmot Rabbah 1 :26). Water, of course, is to play a key role throughout Moses’s life.

The sages (Sotah 12, and parallel midrashim) elaborate on her singular merits. She was, they say, going to bath in the water in order to cleanse herself of the idolatrous customs of her father, for whom the Nile was in fact a god to be worshipped. Another speculation is that God purposely made the day so hot that she was forced to go to the water to cool off.

From here it is but a short stop to the theory that she was using the Nile River as a mikveh (ritual bath) on her way to converting! This, despite the fact that the plain text gives no indication whatsoever of a religious motive behind her brave act. She does not cite the God of the Hebrews or any other deity.

Rather she is drawn to the crying child by pity (ibid 6). One hassidic source notes that the verse says that “she sees him cry,” when surely it should have said that she heard him. This, explains the Rebbe of Worke, is because she saw how he internalized his tears; from this she deduced that he was a Hebrew child!

Yalkut Shmoneh, (Shemot 166) says that the young boy who was crying was Aaron, in order to explain the unusual word for child used in the narrative -- na’ar, which usually refers to a teenager. But it also underlines the central characteristic of the elder brother, who already shows his deep compassion and care for others -- far and near.

Perhaps it is her rebelliousness against the whole Egyptian state apparatus which determines that the daughter of Pharaoh remains unmarried while in the court of her father. Who would want such a head-strong lady -- a single mother yet!​But fear not. The sages in their eagerness to show that good is rewarded in this world, as well as in the next, marry her off to no less than Caleb ben Yefunah. “Let one rebel -- Caleb who defied his fellow spies -- take as a wife one who defied her own father’s decree.”

As one sage added, “This one saved the flock, the other one the shepherd” (Vayikrah Rabbah 1:3). God, too, is not indifferent to this heroism and grants her Edenic bliss in her own lifetime (Shmot Rabba 20:4). Possibly the two sources are linked. Her marriage with (the presumably much younger) Caleb was a form of earthly paradise.

Ultimately, the sages attempt to learn something deeply radical in this story, namely that if someone is genuinely doing something for the sake of the Almighty God, he or she can defy the entire world, and win. It further underlines the later teaching of the Torah that each person is accountable for his or her own actions, and that children do not die for their parents’ misdeeds nor vice versa.

The daughter of Egypt’s king demonstrates the falsity of those who claim that their circumstances prevent them from taking the action required to uphold standards of decency and truth. A person who responds to one baby’s cry is worth a pyramid of philosophy and rationalizations.

One final speculation. Did Bitya really know Miriam and Yocheved’s true identities as Moses’s sister and mother respectively? It is possible to conjecture that she did, but that court etiquette, or some deeper feminine intuition, ignored it. Let the men get on with the business of running the world (often poorly), and leave the women to put it back in order, quietly and with no fuss. The women just had to do what was necessary in a world otherwise gone mad and bereft of hope.